The Lady of The Rain
by Queenblue96
Summary: When Game of thrones meets Naruto. The back drop of the series is the War of the Roses/Cousin's war, just with Naruto Character's and Oc's The Narrator of the story is Hibiki Hyuga, Hinata's mother. "Hibiki fights for her king, her queen, and her daughter Hinata Hyuga, for whom she senses an extraordinary and unexpected future."
1. The Land of Rivers Summer-Winter 1430 P1

Castle of Water,Near Tanigakure,Land of Rivers, Summer-Winter 1430 PT.1

She sits, this odd trophy of war, as neat as an obedient child, on a small stool in the corner of her cell. At her feet are the remains of her dinner on a pewter platter, laid on the straw. I notice that my uncle has sent good slices of meat, and even the white rice from his own table; but she has eaten little. I find I am staring at her, from her boy's riding boots to the man's bonnet crammed on her black cropped hair, as if she were some exotic animal, trapped for our amusement, as if someone had sent a lion cub all the way here to entertain the great family of Goto, for us to keep in our collection. A lady behind me crosses herself and whispers, "Is this a witch?"

I don't know. How does one ever know?

"This is ridiculous," my great-aunt says boldly. "Who has ordered the poor girl to be chained? Open the door at once."

There is a confused muttering of men trying to shift the responsibility, and then someone turns the big key in the cell door and my great-aunt stalks in. The girl - she must be about seventeen or eighteen, only a few years older than me - looks up from under her jagged fringe of hair as my great-aunt stands before her, and then slowly she rises to her feet, doffs her cap, and gives an awkward little bow.

"I am the Lady Jakuri-n, the Lady of Goto," my great-aunt says. "This is the castle of Lord Junzo of Goto." She gestures to my aunt: "This is his wife, the lady of the castle, Junko of Takumi, and this is my great-niece Hibiki."

The girl looks steadily at all of us and gives a nod of her head to each. As she looks at me I feel a little tap for my attention, as palpable as the brush of the fingertip on the nape of my neck, a whisper of magic. I wonder if standing behind her there are indeed two accompanying angels, as she clams, and it is their presence that I sense.

"Can you speak, Maid?" my great-aunt asks, when the girl says nothing.

"Oh yes, my lady," the girl replies in the hard accent of the Nara region. I realise that it is true what they say about her: she is no more than a peasant girl, though she has led an army and crowned a king.

"Will you give me your word not to escape if I have these chains taken off your legs?"

She hesitates, as if she were in any position to choose. "No, I can't."

My great-aunt smiles. "Do you understand the offer of parole? I can release you to live with us here in my nephew's castle; but you have to promise not to run away."

The girl turns her head, frowning. It is almost as if she is listening for advice, then she shakes her head. "I know this parole. It is when one knight makes a promise to another. They have rules as if they were jousting. I'm not like that. My words are real, no like a pretender's poem. And this is no game for me."

"Maid: parole is not a game!" Aunt Junko interrupts. The girl looks at her. "Oh, but it is my lady. The nobleman are not serious about these matters. Not serious like me. They play at war and make up rules. They ride out lay waste to good people's farms and laugh as the thatched roofs burn. Besides, I cannot make promises. I am promised already."

"To the one who wrongly calls himself the King of The Land of Rivers?"

"To the King of Heaven."

My great-aunt pauses for a moment's thought. "I will tell them to take the chains off you and guard you so that you do not escape; and then you can come and sit with us in my rooms. I think what you have done for your country and for your prince has been very great, Jomei, though mistaken. And I will not see you here, under my roof, a captive in chains."

"Will you tell your nephew to set me free?" My great-aunt hesitates. "I cannot order him; but I will do everything I can to send you back to your home. At any event, I won't let him release you to the Land of Fire."

At the very word the girl shudders and makes the sign of the cross, thumping her head and her chest in the most ridiculous way, as a peasant might cross himself at the name of Old Hob. I have a choke back a laugh. This draws the girl's dark gaze to me.

"They are only mortal men," I explain to her. "The Land of Fire have no powers beyond that of mortal men. You need not fear them so. You need not cross yourself at their name."

"I don't fear them. I am not such a fool as to fear that they have powers. It's not that. It's that they know that I have powers. That's what makes them such a danger. They are mad with fear of me so much that they will destroy me the moment I fall into their hands. I am their terror. I am their fear that walks by night,"

"While I live, they won't have you," my great-aunt assures her; and at once, unmistakably, Jomei looks straight at me, hard dark gaze as if to see that I too have heard, in this sincere assertion, the ring of utterly empty promise.

My great-aunt believes that if she can bring Jomei into our company, talk with her, cool her religious fervour, perhaps educate her, then the girl will be led, in time, to wear the dress of a young woman, and the fighting youth who was dragged off the white of horse at the river will be transformed, like Mass reversed, from strong wine into water, and she will become a young woman who can be seated among waiting women, who will answer to a command and not to the ringing church bells, and will then, perhaps, be overlooked by the Land of Fire, who are demanding that we surrender to offer the hermaphrodite murderous witch to them. If we have nothing to offer them but remorseful obedient maid in waiting, perhaps they will be satisfied and go their violent way.

Jomei herself is exhausted by recent defeats and by her uneasy sense that the king she has crowned is not worthy of the holy oil, that the enemy she had on the run has recoiled on her, and that the mission given to her by God himself is falling away from her. Everything that made her the Maid before her adoring troop of soldiers has become uncertain. Under my great-aunt's steady kindness she is becoming once more an awkward country girl: nothing special.

Of course, all the maids in waiting to my great-aunt want to know about the adventure that is ending in this slow creep of defeat, and as Jomei spends her days with us, learning to be a girl and not the Maid, they pluck up the courage to ask her.

"How were you so brave?" one demands. "How did you learn to be so brave? In battle, I mean."

Jomei smiles at the question. There are four of us, seated on a grass bank beside the moat of the castle, as idle as children. The July sun is beating down and the pasture lands around the castle are shimmering in the haze of heat; even the bees are lazy, buzzing and then falling silent as if drunk on flowers. We have chosen to sit in the deep shadow of the highest tower; behind us, in the glassy water of the moat, we can hear the occasional bubble of a carp coming to the surface.

Jomei sprawled like a boy, one hand dabbling in the water, her cap over her eyes. In the basket beside me are half-sewn shirts that we are supposed to hem for the poor children of the nearby village. But the maids avoid work of any sort, Jomei has no skill, and I have my great-aunt's precious pack of playing cards in my hands and I am shuffling and cutting them and idly looking at the pictures.

"I knew I was called by God," Jomei said simply. "And that He would protect me, so I had no fear. Not even in the worst of the battles. He warned me that I would be injured but that I would feel no pain, so I knew I could go on fighting. I even warned my men that I would be injured that day. I knew before we went into battle. I just knew."

"Do you really hear voices?" I ask.

"Do you?"

The question is so shocking that the girls whip round to stare at me and under their joint gaze I find I am blushing as if for something shameful. "No! No!"

"Then what?

"What do you mean?"

"What do you hear?" she asks, as reasonably as if everyone hears something.

"Well, not voices exactly," I say.

"What do you hear?"

I glance behind me as if the very fish might rise to eavesdrop. "When someone in my family is going to die, then I hear a noise," I say.

"A special noise?"

"What sort of noise?" the girl, Eiko, ask.

"I didn't know this. Could I hear it?"

"You are not of my house," I say irritably. "Of course you wouldn't hear it. You would have to be a descendant of … and anyway, you must never speak of this. You shouldn't really be listening. I shouldn't be telling you."

"What sort of noise? Jomei repeats.

"Like singing," I say, and see her nod, as if she too has heard singing. "They say it is the voice of Mizu, the first lady of the House of Goto," I whisper. "They say she was a water goddess who came out of the river to marry the first duke but she couldn't be a mortal woman. She comes back to cry for the loss of her children."

"And when have you heard her?"

"The night that my baby sister died. I heard something. And I knew at once that it was Mizu."

"But how did you know it was her?" the other maid whispers, afraid of being excluded from the conversation.

I shrug, and Jomei smiles in recognition of truths that cannot be explained. "I just knew," I say. "It's was as if I recognised her voice. As if I always known it."

"That's true. You just know," Jomei nods. "But how do you know that it comes from God and not from the Devil?"

I hesitate. Any spiritual questions should be taken to my confessor, or at the very least to my mother or my great-aunt. But the song of Mizu, and the shiver on my spine, and my occasional sight of the unseen - something half-lost, sometimes vanishing around a corner, lighter grey in a twilight, a dream that is too clear to be forgotten, a glimpse of foresight but never anything that I can describe - these things are too thin for speech. How can I ask about them when I cannot even put them into words? How can I bear to have someone clumsy name them or, even worse, try to explain them? I might as well try to hold the greenish water of the moat in my cupped hands.

"I've never asked," I say. "Because it is hardly anything. Like when you go into a room and it is quiet - but you know, you can just tell, that someone is there. You can't hear or see them, but you just know. It's little more than that. I never think of it as a gift coming from God or the Devil. It's just nothing."

"My voices come from God," Jomei says certainly. " I know it. If it were no true, I should be utterly lost."

"So can you tell fortunes?" Eiko asks me childishly. My fingers close over my cards. "No," I say. "And these don't tell fortunes, they are just for playing. They're just playing cards. I don't tell fortunes. My great-aunt would not allow me to do it, even if I could."

"Oh, do mine!"

"These are just playing cards," I insist. "I'm no fortunate teller."

"Oh, draw a card for me and tell me," Eiko says. "And for Jomei. What's going to become of her? Surely you want to know what's going to happen to Jomei?"

"It means nothing," I say to Jomei. "And I only brought them so we could play."

"They are beautiful," she says. "They taught me to play at court with cards like these. How bright they are."

I hand them to her. "Take care with them, they're very precious," I say jealousy as she spreads them in her calloused hands. "The Lady showed them to me when I a little girl and told me the names of the pictures. She lets me borrow them because I love to play. But I promised her I would take care of them."

Jomei passes the pack back to me and though she is careful, and my hands are ready for them, one of the thick cards tumbles between us and falls face down, on the grass. "Oh! Sorry," Jomei exclaims, and quickly picks it up.

I can feel a whisper, like a cool breath down my spine. The meadow before me and cows flicking their tails in the shade of the tree seem far away, as if we two are enclosed in a glass, butterflies in a bowl, in another world. "You had better look at it now," I hear myself say to her.

Jomei looks at the brightly painted picture, her eyes widen slightly, and then she shows it to me. "What does this mean?"

It is a painting of a man in a livery of blue, hanging upside down from one extended foot, the other leg crooked easily, his toe pointed and placed against his straight leg as if he were dancing, inverted in the air. His hands are clasped behind his back as if he were bowing; we both see the happy fall of his blue hair as he hangs, upside down smiling.

"The hanged man," Eiko reads. "How horrid. What does it mean? Oh, surely it doesn't mean …" She breaks off.

"It doesn't mean you will be hanged," I say quickly to Jomei. "So don't think that. It's just a playing card, it can't mean anything like that."

"But what does it mean?" the other girl demands though Jomei is silent, as if it is not her card, not her fortune that I am refusing to tell.

"His gallows is two growing trees," I say. I am playing for time under Jomei's serious gaze. "This means spring and renewal and life - not death. And there are two trees; the man is balanced between them. He is the very centre of resurrection." Jomei nods. "They are bowed down to him, he is happy. And look: he is not hanged by his neck to kill him, but tied by his foot," I say. "If he wanted, he could stretch up and untie himself. He could set himself free, if he wanted."

"But he doesn't set himself free," the girl observes. "He is like a tumbler, an acrobat. What does that mean?"

"It means that he is willingly there, willingly waiting, allowing himself to be held by his foot, hanging in the air."

"To be a living sacrifice?" Jomei says slowly, in the words of Mass.

"He is not crucified," I point out quickly. It is a if every word I say leads us to another form of death. "This doesn't mean anything."

"No," she says. "These are just playing cards, and we are just playing a game with them. It is a pretty card, the Hanged Man. He looks happy. He looks happy to be upside down in spring time. Shall I teach you a game with counters that we play in Nara?"

"Yes," I say. I hold out my hand for her card and she looks at it for a moment before she hands it back to me.

"Honestly, it means nothing; I say again to her. She smiles at me, her clear honest smile. "I know well enough what it means," she says.

"Shall we play?" I start to shuffle the cards and one turns over in my hand. "Now that's a good card," Jomei remarks. "Wheel of Fortune." I hold it out to show her. "It is the Wheel of Fortune that can throw you up very high, or bring you down very low. It's message is to be indifferent to victory and defeat, as they both come on the turn of the wheel."

"In my village farmers make a sign for fortune's wheel," Jomei remarks. "They draw a circle in the air with their forefinger when something very good or something very bad happens. Someone inherits money, or someone loses a prize cow, they do this." She points her finger in the air and draws a circle. "And they say something."

"A spell?"

"Not really a spell." She smiles mischievously

"What then?

She giggles. "They say "shit"."

I am shocked that I rock back with laughter.

"What? What?" the younger maid demands.

"Nothing, nothing," I say. Jomei is still giggling. "Jomei's village-men say rightly everything comes to dust, and all that a man can do about it is to learn indifference."


	2. The Land of Rivers Summer-Winter 1430 P2

Castle of Water,Near Tanigakure,Land of Rivers, Summer-Winter 1430 PT.2

Jomei's future hangs in balance: she is swinging like the Hanged Man. All of my family, my father Piko the Count of St Mizuki, my uncle Ryuu of Goto, and my favorite uncle, Junzo of Goto, are allied with the Land of Fire. My father writes from our home at the chateau at St Mizuki to his brother Junzo, and commands him, as the head of our family, to hand over Jomei to the Land of Fire. But my great-aunt the Lady insists we keep her safe; and my uncle Junzo hesitates.

The Land of Fire demand his prisoner and, since the Land of Fire command nearly all of the Land of Rivers and their ally the Duke of Izumi commands most of the rest, what they say usually happens. Their common soldiers went down on their knees on the battlefield to give thanks, and wept with joy when the Maid was captured. There is no doubt in their mind that without her the Rivers army, their enemy, will collapse into the frightened rabble that they were before she came to them.

The Duke of Konohagakure, the Land of Fire regent who rules the Fire lands in the Land of Rivers, almost all of the north of the country, sends daily letters to my uncle invoking his loyalty to the Land of Fire rule, their long friendship, and promising money. I like to watch the Fire messengers who come dressed in the fine livery of the royal duke, on beautiful horses. Everyone says that the duke is a great man and well loved, the greatest man in Rivers, an ill man to cross; but so far, my uncle obeys his aunt, the Lady, and does not hand over our prisoner.

My uncle expects the Rivers court to make a bid for her - They owe their very existence to her after all - but they are oddly silent, even after he writes to them and says that he has the Maid, and that she is ready to return to court of her king and serve again in his army. With her leading them they could ride out against the Land of Fire and win. Surely they will send a fortune to get her back?

"They don't want her," my great-aunt advises him. They are at their private dining table, the great dinner for the whole household has taken place in the hall and the two of them have sat before my uncle's men, tasted the dishes and sent them round the room as a gift to their special favourites. Now they are comfortable, seated at a little table before the fire in my great-aunt's private rooms, her personal servants in attendance. I am to stand during the serving of dinner with another lady in waiting. It is my job to watch the servants, summon them forwards as required, clasp my hands modestly before me, and hear nothing. Of course, I listen all the time.

"Jomei made a man out of the boy Prince Chieko, he was nothing until she came to him with her vision, then she made that man into a king. She taught him to claim his inheritance. She made an army out of his camp-followers, and made that army victorious. If they had followed her advice as she followed her voices, they would have driven the Land of Fire out of these lands and back to their foggy villages, and we would be rid of them forever."

My uncle smiles. "Oh, my lady aunt! This is a war that has gone on nearly a century. Do you really think it will end because some girl from who knows where hear voices? She could never drive the Fire away. They would never have gone; they will never go. These are their lands by right, by true right of inheritance, and by conquest too. All they have to do is to have courage and strength to hold them, and Jiro Duke of Konohagakure will see to that." He glances at his wineglass and I snap my fingers to the groom of servery to pour him some more red wine. I step forwards to hold on the glass as the man pours, and then I put it carefully on the table. They are using fine glassware; my uncle is wealthy and my great-aunt never has anything but the very best. "The Fire king may be little more than a child, but it makes no difference to the safety of his kingdom, for his uncle Konohagakure is loyal to him here, and his uncle the Duke of Hakone is loyal to him in the Land of Fire. Konohagakure has the courage and the allies to hold the Fire lands here, and I think they will drive the Prince further and further south. They will drive him into the sea. The Maid had her season, and it was remarkable one; but in the end, the Land of Fire will win the war and hold the lands that are theirs by right, and all of our lords who are sworn against them now will bow the knee and serve them."

"I don't think so," my great-aunt says staunchly. "The Land of Fire are terrified of her. They say she is unbeatable."

"Not anymore," my uncle observes. "For behold! She is a prisoner, and the cell doors don't burst open. They know she is mortal now. They saw her with an arrow in her thigh outside the walls of Tanigakure and her own army marched off and left her. The Land of Rivers themselves taught the Land of Fire that she could be brought down and abandoned."

"But you won't give her to the Land of Fire," my great-aunt states. "It would be to dishonour us forever, in the eyes of God and the world."

My uncle leans forwards to speak confidentially. "You take it so seriously? You really think she is more than a mountebank? You really think she is something more than a peasant girl spouting nonsense? You know I could find half a dozen such as her?

"You could find half a dozen who say they are like her; she says. "But not one like her. I think she is a special girl. Truly I do, nephew. I have a very strong sense of this."

He pauses, as if her sense of things, though she is only a woman, is something to be considered. "You have had a vision of her success? A foretelling?

For a moment she hesitates, then she quickly shakes her head. "Nothing so clear. But nonetheless, I must insist that we protect her."

He pauses, not wanting to contradict her. She is the Lady of Goto, head of our family. My father will inherit the title when she dies; but she also owns great lands that are all at her own disposition: she can will them to anyone she chooses. My uncle Junzo is her favorite nephew; he has hopes, and he does not want to offend her.

"The Land of Rivers will have to pay a good price for her," he says. "I don't intend to lose money on her. She is worth a king's ransom. They know this."

My great-aunt nods. "I will write to Prince Chieko and he will ransom her," she tells him. "Whatever his advisors say, he will still listen to me, though he is blown about like a leaf by his favourites. But I am his godmother. It is a question of honour. He owes all that he is to the Maid."

"Very well. But do it at once. The Land of Fire are very pressing and I won't offend the Duke of Konohagakure. He is a powerful man, and a fair one. He is the best ruler of the Land of Rivers that we could hope for. If he were a Riversman he would be wholly loved."

My great-aunt laughs. "Yes, but he is not! He's the Land of Fire regent, and he should go back to his own damp land and his little nephew, the poor king, and make what they can of their own kingdom and leave us to rule Rivers."

"Us?" my uncle queries, as if to ask her if she thinks that our family, who already rule half dozen earldoms and who count kinship to the Holy Emperors, should be Rivers kings as well.

She smiles. "Us," she says blandly.


	3. The Land of Rivers Summer-Winter 1430 P3

Castle of Water,Near Tanigakure,Land of Rivers, Summer-Winter 1430 PT.3

Next day I walk with Jomei to the little chapel in the castle and kneel beside her on the chancel steps. She prays fervently, her head bowed for an hour, and then the priest comes and serves the Mass and Jomei takes the Holy bread and wine. I wait for her at the back of the church. Jomei is the only person I know who takes the bread and wine every day, as if it were her breakfast. My own mother, who is more observant than most, takes communion only once a month. We walk back to my great-aunt's rooms together, the strewing herbs swishing around our feet. Jomei laughs at me, as I have to duck my head to get my tall conical headdress through the narrow doorways.

"It is very beautiful," she says. "But I should not like to wear such a thing."

I pause and twirl before her in the bright sunlight from the arrowslit. The colours of my gown are brilliant: a skirt of dark blue and an underskirt of a sharper turquoise, the skirts flaring from the high belt tied tight on my ribcage. The high henin headdress sits like a cone on my head and sprouts a veil of pale blue from the peak that drops down my back, concealing and enhancing my dark hair. I spread my arms to show the big triangular sleeves, trimmed with the most beautiful embroidery in gold thread, and I lift the hem to show my scarlet slippers with the upturned toes.

"But you cannot work, or ride a horse, or even run in such a gown," she says

"It's not for riding or working or running," I reply reasonably. "It's for showing off. It is to show the world that I am young and beautiful and ready for marriage. It is to show that my father is so wealthy that I can wear gold thread on my sleeves and silk in my headdress. It shows that I am so nobly born that I can wear velvet and silk; not wool like a poor girl."

"I couldn't bear to be showed off in such a thing."

"You wouldn't be allowed to," I point out disagreeably. "You have to dress for your position in life; you would have to obey the law and wear browns and greys. Did you really think you were important enough to wear ermine? Or do you want your gold surcoat back? They say you were as fine as any knight in battle. You dressed like a nobleman then. They say that you loved your beautiful standard and polished armour, and a fine surcoat over all. They say you were guilty of the sin of vanity."

She flushes. "I had to be seen," she says defensively. "At the front of my army."

"Gold?"

"I had to honour God."

"Well anyway, you wouldn't get a headdress like this if you put on women's clothes," I say. "You would wear something more modest, like the ladies in waiting, nothing so high or so awkward, just a neat hood to cover your hair. And you could wear your boots under your gown, you could still walk about. Won't you try wearing a gown, Jomei? It would mean that they couldn't accuse you of wearing men's clothes. It is a sign of heresy for a woman to dress as a man. Why not put on a dress, and then they can say nothing against you? Something plain?"

She shakes her head. "I am promised," she says simply. "Promised to God. And when the king calls for me, I must be ready to ride to arms again. I am a soldier in waiting, not a lady in waiting. I will dress like a soldier. And my king will call for me, any day now."

I glance behind us. A pageboy carrying a jug of hot water is in earshot. I wait till he has nodded a bow and gone past us. "Hush," I say quietly. "You shouldn't even call him king."

She laughs, as if she fears nothing. "I took him to coronation, I saw him presented to his people in his crown. Of course he is the King of The Land of Rivers: he is crowned and anointed."

"The Land of Fire slit the tongues of anyone who says that," I remind her. "That's for the first offence. The second time you say it, they brand your forehead so you are scarred for life. The Land of Fire king, Shunsuke, is to be called King of The Land of Rivers, the one you call the Rivers king is to be called Prince, never anything but the Prince."

She laughs with genuine amusement. "He is not even to be called a Riversman," she exclaims. "Your great Duke Konohagakure says he is to be called Biei. But the great Duke Konohagakure was shaking with fear and running around Niseko for recruits when I came up to the walls of Tanigakure with the Rivers army- yes, I will say It!- the Rivers army to calm our own city for our king, a Rivers king; and we nearly took it, too."

I put my hands over my ears. "I won't hear you, and you shouldn't speak like this. I shall be whipped if I listen to you."

At once she takes my hands, she is penitent. "Ah, Hibiki, I won't get you into trouble. Look! I will say nothing. But you must see that I have done far worse than use words against the Land of Fire. I have used arrows and cannons and battering rams and guns against them! The Fire will hardly trouble themselves over the words I have said and the breeches I wear. I have defeated them and shown everyone that they have no right to the Land of Rivers. I led an army against them and defeated them over and over again."

"I hope they never get a hold of you, and never question you. Not about words, nor arrows, nor cannons."

She goes a little pale at the thought of it. "Please God, I hope so too. Merciful God, I hope so too."

"My great-aunt is writing to the Prince," I say very low. "They were speaking of it at dinner last night. She will write to the Prince and invite him to ransom you. And my uncle will release you to the Ri … to the Bieis."

She bows her head and her lips move in prayer. "My king will send for me," she says trustingly. "Without a doubt he will send for me to come to him, and we can start our battles again."


	4. The Land of Rivers Summer-Winter 1430 P4

Castle of Water,Near Tanigakure,Land of Rivers, Summer-Winter 1430 PT.4

It grows even hotter in August, and my great-aunt rests on a daybed in her inner room every afternoon, with the light curtains of silk around the bed soaked in lavender water and the closed shutters throwing barred shadows across the stone floor. She likes me to read to her, as she lies with her eyes closed and her hands folded on the high waistline of her dress, as if she were a sculpted effigy of herself in some shaded tomb. She puts aside a big horned headdress that she always wears and lets her long greying hair spread over the cool embroidered pillows. She gives me books from her own library that tell of great romances and poets and ladies in tangled forests, and then one afternoon she puts a book in my hand and says, "Read this today."

It is hand-copied in the old Rivers-Language and I stumble over the words. It is hard to read: the illustrations in the margins are like briars and flowers threading through the letters, and the clerk who copied each word had an ornate style of writing which I find hard to decipher. But slowly the story emerges. It is the story of a knight riding through a dark forest who has lost his way. He hears the sound of water and goes towards it. In a clearing, in the moonlight, he sees a white basin and a splashing fountain and in the water is a woman of such beauty that her skin is paler than the white marble and her hair is darker than the night skies. He falls in love with her at once, and she with him, and he takes her castle and makes her his wife. She has only one condition: that every month he must leave her alone to bathe.

"Do you know this story?" my great-aunt asks me. "Has your father told you of it?"

"I have heard something like it," I say cautiously. My great-aunt is notoriously quick-tempered with my father and I don't know if I dare say that I think this is the legend of founding of our house.

"Well, now you are reading the true story," she says. She closes her eyes again. "It is time you knew. Go on."

The young couple are happier than any in the world, and people come from far and wide to visit them. They have children: beautiful girls and strange wild boys.

"Sons," my great-aunt whispers to herself. "If only a woman could have sons by wishing, if only they could be as she wishes."

The wife never loses her beauty though the years go by, and her husband grows more and more curious. One day, he cannot bear the mystery of her secret bathing any longer and creeps down to her bath-house and spies on her.

My great-aunt raises her hand. "Do you know what he see? She asks me.

I lift my face from the book, my finger under the illustration of the man peering through the slats of the bath-house. In the foreground is the woman in the bath, her beautiful hair snaked around her white shoulders. And gleaming in the water … her large scaled tail.

"Is she a fish?" I whisper.

"She is a being not of this world," my great-aunt says quietly. "She tried to live like an ordinary woman; but some women cannot live an ordinary life. She tried to walk in common ways; but some women cannot put their feet to that path. This is a man's world, Hibiki, and some women cannot march to the beat of a man's drum. Do you understand?"

I don't, of course. I am too young to understand that a man and a woman can love each other so deeply that their hearts beat as if they were one heart, and yet, at the same time, know that they are utterly hopelessly different.

"Anyway, you can read on. It's not long now."

The husband cannot bear to know that his wife is strange being. She cannot forgive him for spying on her. She leaves him, taking her beautiful daughters, and lives alone with the sons, heartbroken. But at his death, as at the death everyone of our house, his wife Mizu, the beautiful woman who was an undine, a water goddess, back to him and hears her crying around the battlements for the children she has lost, for the husband she still loves, and for the world that has no place for her.

I close the book, and there is such a long silence that I think my great-aunt has fallen asleep.

"Some of the women of our family have the gift of foresight," my great-aunt remarks quietly. "Some of them have inherited powers from Mizu, powers of the other world where she lives. Some of us are her daughters, her heirs."

I hardly dare to breathe, I am so anxious that she should go on speaking to me.

"Hibiki, do you think you might be one of these women?"

"I might be," I whisper. "I hope so."

"You have to listen," she says softly. "Listen to silence, watch for nothing. And be on your guard. Mizu is a shapeshifter, like quicksilver, she can flow from one thing to another. You may see her anywhere, she is like water. Or you may see only your own reflection in surface of a stream though you are straining your eyes to see into the green depths for her."

"Will she be my guide?"

"You must be your own guide, but you might hear her when she speaks to you." She pauses. "Fetch my jewel box." She gestures towards the great chest at the foot of her bed. I open the creaking lid and inside, beside the gowns wrapped in powdered silk, is a large wooden box. I take it out. Inside is a series of drawers, each one filled with my great-aunt's fortune of jewels. "Look in the smallest drawer," she says.

I find it. Inside is a small black velvet purse. I untie the tasselled threads, open the mouth, and heavy golden bracelet falls into my hand, laden with about two hundred little charms, each one a different shape. I see a ship, a horse, a star, a spoon, a whip, a hawk, a spur.

"When you want to know something very, very important, you choose two or three of the charms - charms that signify the thing that might be, the choices before you. You tie each one on a string and you put them in a river, the river nearest to your home, the river that you hear at night when everything is silent but the voice of the waters. You leave it until the moon is new. Then you cut all the strings but one, and pull that one out to see your future. The river will give you the answer. The river will tell you what you should do."

I nod. The bracelet is cold and heavy in hand, each charm a choice, each charm an opportunity, each charm a mistake in waiting.

"And when you want something: go out and whisper it to the river - like a prayer. When you curse somebody: write it on a piece of paper, and put the paper into the river, float it like a little paper boat. The river is your ally, your friend, your lady - do you understand?"

I nod, though I don't understand.

"When you curse somebody …" She pauses and sighs as if she is very weary. "Take care with your words, Hibiki, especially in cursing. Only say the things you mean, make sure you lay your curse on the right man. For be very sure that when you put such words out in the world they can overshoot - like an arrow, a curse can go beyond your target and harm another. A wise woman curses very sparingly."

I shiver, though the room is hot.

"I will teach you more," she promises me. "It is your inheritance, since you are the oldest girl."

"Do boys not know? My brother Riku?"

Her lazy eyes half open and smiles at me. "Men command the world that they know," she says. "Everything that men know, they make their own. Everything that they learn, they claim for themselves. They are like the alchemists who look for the laws that govern the world, and then want to own them and keep them secret. Everything they discover, they hug to themselves, they shape knowledge into their own selfish image. What is left to us women, but the realms of the unknown?"

"But can women not take a great place in the world? You Great-aunt, and Yuko of Hadano is called the Queen of four Kingdoms. Shall I not command great lands like you and her?"

"You might. But I warn you that a woman who seeks great power and wealth has to pay a great price. Perhaps you will be a great woman like Mizu, or Yuko, or like me; but you will be like all women: uneasy in the world of men. You will do your best - perhaps you will gain some power if you marry well or inherit well - but you will always find the road is hard beneath your feet. In the other world - well, who knows about the other world? Maybe they will hear you, and perhaps you will hear them."

"What will I hear?"

She smiles. "You know. You hear it already."

"Voices?" I ask, thinking of Jomei.

"Perhaps."


	5. The Land of Rivers Summer-Winter 1430 P5

Castle of Water,Near Tanigakure,Land of Rivers, Summer-Winter 1430 PT.5

Slowly, the intense heat of the summer starts to fade and it grows cooler in September. The trees of the great forest that surround the lake start to turn colour from tired green to sere yellow, and the swallows swirl around the turrets of the castle every evening, as if to say goodbye for another year. They chase each other round and round in a dizzying train, like a veil being whirled in a dance. The rows on rows of vines grow heavy with fruit and every day the peasant woman go out with their sleeves rolled up over their big forearms and pick and pick the fruit into big wicker baskets, which the men swing onto carts and take back to the press. The smell of fruit and fermenting wine is heavy in the village, everyone has blue-stained hems to their gowns and purple feet, and they say it will be a good year this year, rich and lush. When the ladies in waiting and I ride through the village they call us to taste the new wine and it is light and sharp and fizzy in our mouths, and they laugh at our puckered faces.

My great-aunt does not sit straight-backed in her chair, overseeing her women and beyond them the castle and my uncle's lands, as she did at the start of the summer. As the sun loses its heat she too seems to be growing pale and cold. She lies down from the middle of the morning to the early evening, and only rises from her bed to walk into the great hall beside my uncle and nod her head at rumble of greeting, as the men look up at their daggers.

Jomei prays for her, by name, in her daily attendance at church, but I, childlike, just accept the new rhythm of my great-aunt's day, and sit with her to read in the afternoon, and wait for her to talk to me about the prayers floated like paper ships on the waters of rivers that were flowing to the sea before I was born. She tells me to spread out the cards of her pack and teaches me the name and the quality of each one.

"And now read them for me," she says one day, and then taps a card with her thin finger. "What is this one?"

I turn it over for her. The dark hooded shape of Death looks back at us, his face hidden in the shadow of his hood, his scythe over his hunched shoulder.

"Ah well," she says. "So are you here at last, my friend? Hibiki, you had better ask your uncle to come to see me."

I show him into her room and he kneels at the side of her bed. She puts her hand on his head as if in blessing. Then she pushes him gently away.

"I cannot bear this weather," she says crossly to my uncle, as if the cooling days are his fault. "How can you bear to live here? It is as cold as the Land of Fire and the winters last forever. I shall go south, I shall go to Beppu."

"Are you sure?" he asks. "I thought you were feeling tired. Should you not rest here?"

She snaps her fingers irritably. "I'm too cold," she says imperiously. "You can order me a guard and I shall have my litter lined with furs. I shall come back in spring."

"Surely you would be more comfortable here?" he suggests.

"I have a fancy to see the Kuma once more," she says. "Besides I have business to do."

Nobody can ever argue against her - she is the Lady - and within days she has her litter at the door, furs heaped on the bed, a brass hand-warmer filled with hot coals, the floor of the litter packed with oven-heated bricks to keep her warm, the household lined up to say farewell.

She gives her hand to Jomei, and then kisses my aunt Junko and me. My uncle helps her into the litter and she clutches his arm with her thin hand. "Keep the Maid safe," she says. "Keep her from the Land of Fire, it is my command."

He ducks his head. "Come back to us soon."

His wife, whose life is easier when the great lady has moved on, steps forwards to tuck her in and kiss her pale cool cheeks. But it is me that the Lady of Goto calls towards her with one crook of her skinny finger.

"God bless you, Hibiki," she says to me. "You will remember all that I taught you. And you will go far." She smiles at me. "Farther than you can imagine."

"But I will see you in spring?"

"I will send you my books," she says. "And my bracelet."

"And you will come to visit my mother and father at St Mizuki in the spring?"

Her smile tells me that I will not see her again. "God bless," she repeats and draws the curtains of her litter against the cold morning air as the cavalcade starts out the gate.


	6. The Land of Rivers Summer-Winter 1430 P6

Castle of Water,Near Tanigakure,Land of Rivers, Summer-Winter 1430 PT.6

In November, I am awakened in the darkest of the night, and I sit up in the little bed I share with Eiko the maid, and listen. It is as if someone is calling my name in a sweet voice: very high, and very thin. Then I am sure I can hear someone singing. Oddly, the noise is coming from outside out window, though we are high up in the turret of the castle. I pull out through the crack in the wooden shutters. There are no lights showing outside, the fields and woods around the castle are black as felted wool, there is nothing but this clear keening noise, not a nightingale but as high and as pure as a nightingale. Not an owl, far too musical and continuous, something like a boy singer in a choir. I turn to the bed and shake Eiko awake.

"Can you hear that?"

She does not even wake. "Nothing," she says, half-asleep. "Stop it, Hibiki. I'm sleep."

The stone floor is icy beneath my bare feet. I jump back into bed and put my cold feet in the warm space near Eiko. She gives a little a bad-tempered grunt and rolls away from me, and then - though I think I will lie in the warm and listen to the voices - I fall asleep.

Six days later they tell me that my great-aunt, Jakuri-n of Goto, died in her sleep, in the darkest hour of the night, in Beppu, beside the great River Kuma. Then I know whose voice it was I heard, singing around the turrets.

As soon as the Land of Fire Duke of Konohagakure learns that Jomei has lost her greatest protector, he sends the judge Suizei Yamato, with a troop of men behind him, to negotiate for her ransom. She is summoned by a Church court on charges of heresy. Enormous sums of money change hands: twenty thousand livres for the man who pulled her off her house, ten thousand francs to be paid to my uncle with the good wishes of the King of The Land of Fire. My uncle does not listen to his wife, who pleads that Jomei shall be left with us. I am too unimportant to even voice, and so I have to watch in silence as my uncle makes an agreement that Jomei shall be released to the Church for questioning. "I am not handing her over to the Land of Fire," he says to his wife. "As the Lady asked me, and I have not forgotten, I have not handed her over to the Land of Fire. I have only released her to the Church. This allows her to clear her name of all charges against her. She will be judged by men of God, if she is innocent they will say so, and she will be released."

She looks at him as blankly as if he were Death himself, and I wonder if he believes this nonsense, of if he thinks we, being women, are such fools as to think that church dependent on the Land of Fire, with bishops appointed by the Land of Fire, are going to tell their rulers and paymasters that the girl who raised all of the Land of Rivers against them is just an ordinary girl, perhaps a little noisy, perhaps a naughty, and she should be sent back to her farm, to her mother and father and her cows.

"My lord, who is going to tell Jomei?" is all I dare to ask.

"Oh, she knows already," he says over his shoulder as he goes out of the hall, to bid farewell to Suizei Yamato at the great gate. "I sent a page to tell her to get ready. She is to leave with them now."

As soon as I hear the words I am filled with a sudden terror, a gale of premonition, and I start running, running as if for my own life. I don't even go to the women's apartments, where the page-boy will find Jomei to tell her the Land of Fire are to have her. I don't run towards her old cell, thinking she has gone there to fetch her little knapsack of things: her wooden chopsticks, her sharp dagger, the prayer-book that my great-aunt gave her. Instead I race up the winding stair to the first floor above the great hall, and then dash across the gallery, through the tiny doorway where the archway knocks my headdress off, tearing at the pins in my hair, and then I hammer up the circular stone stair, my feet pounding on the steps, my breath coming shorter and shorter, my gown clutched in my hands, so that I can burst out onto the flat roof at the very top of the tower and see Jomei, poised like a bird ready to fly, balanced on the wall of the turret. As she hears the door bang open she looks over her shoulder at me and hears me scream. "Jomei! No!" and she steps out into the void below her.

The worst thing of all, the very worst thing, is that she does not leap into nothing, like a frightened deer. I was dreading that she would jump, but she does something far worse than that. She dives. She goes headfirst over the battlement, and as I fling myself to the edge I can see that she goes down like a dancer, an acrobat, her hands clasped behind her, one leg extended like a dancer, the other bent, the toe pointed to her knee, and I see that heart-stopping moment as she falls, she is in the pose of the Hanged Man, and she is going headfirst to her death with his calm smile on her serene face.

The thud when she hits the ground at the base of the tower is terrible. It echoes in my ears as if it is my own head that has struck the mud. I want to run down to lift her body, Jomei, the Maid, crumpled like a bag of old clothes; but I cannot move. My knees have given way beneath me; I am clinging to the stone battlements, they are as cold as my scraped hands. I am not crying for her, though my breath is still coming gulping sobs; I am frozen with horror, i am felled by horror. Jomei was a young woman who tried to walk her own path in the world of men, just as my great-aunt told me. And it led her to this cold tower, this swan dive, this death.


	7. The Land of Rivers Summer-Winter 1430 P7

Castle of Water,Near Tanigakure,Land of Rivers, Summer-Winter 1430 PT.7

They pick her up lifeless, and for your days she does not move or stir, but then she comes out of her stupor and gets up slowly from her bed, patting herself all over, as if to make sure that she is whole. Amazingly, no bones have been broken in her fall- she has cracked her skull, nor snapped so much as a finger. It is as if her angels held her up, even when she gave herself into their element. Of course, this will not serve her; they are quick to say that only the Devil could have saved a girl who went headfirst like that from such a tall tower. If she had died they would have said God's justice had been done. My uncle, a man of dour common sense, says that the ground is so sodden, after weeks of winter rain, and lapped by moat, that she was in more danger of drowning than being broken; but now he is determined that she shall leave at once. He doesn't want the responsibility of the Maid in his house, without the Lady to keep everything safe. He sends her first to his house in Akita, then we follow, as she is transferred to the Fire city of Iwate for trial.

We have to attend. A great lord such as my uncle must be there to see justice being, done, and his household must stand behind him. My aunt Junko takes me to witness the end of the Prince's holy guide - the pretend-prophet of the pretend-king. Half of the Land of Rivers is trooping to Iwate to see the end of the Maid and we have to be foremost among them.

For someone that they declare is nothing more than a peasant girl run mad, they are taking no chances. She is housed in the Castle Shuri and kept in chains, in a cell with double locked door and the window boarded over. They are all in a terror that she will run like a mouse under the door, or fly like a bird through a crack in the window. They ask her to give an undertaking that she will not try to escape and, when she refuses, they chain her to the bed.

"She won't like that," my aunt Junko says sorrowfully.

"No."

They are waiting for the Duke of Konohagakure, and in the very last days of December he marches into the town with his guard dressed in the colours of roses, the bright red and white of the Land of Fire. He is a great man on horseback, he wears armour polished so brightly that you would take it for silver and beneath his huge helmet his face is grave and stern, his big break of a nose marking him look like predatory bird: an eagle. He was brother to the great Fire king Jimmu, and he guards the lands that his brother won in the Land of Rivers at the great battle of Wa.

Now the dead king's young son is the new victor of the Land of Rivers, and this is his most loyal uncle: seldom out of his armour or out of the saddle, never at peace.

We are all lined up at the great gate of Iwate as he rides in, and his dark gaze rakes us all, looking from one to another as if to sniff out treason. My aunt and I curtsey low and my uncle Junzo doffs his hat and bows. Our house been in alliance with the Land of Fire for years; my other uncle, Ryuu of Goto, is the duke's chancellor and swears that he is the greatest man ever to rule the Land of Rivers.

Heavily, he gets off his house and stands like a fortress himself, as the men line up to greet him, bowing over his hand, some of them almost going down to their knees. A man comes forwards and, as Konohagakure acknowledges him with a lordly tip on his head, his glance goes over his vassal's head, and sees me. I am staring at him, of course - he is the greatest spectacle on this cold winter day - but now he is looking back at me, and there is a flash in his eyes which I see and cannot recognise. It is something like a sudden hunger, like fasting man seeing a banquet. I step back. I am neither afraid nor coquettish, but I am only fourteen years of age and there is something about the power of this man and his energy that I don't want turned in my direction. I slide back a little so I am behind my aunt, and I watch the rest of the greeting masked by her headdress and veil.

A great litter comes up, thick curtains tied tight with gold cord against the cold, and Konohagakure's wife, the Duchess Atsuko, is helped out. A small cheer greets her from our men: she is of the House of Izumi, our liege lords and relations, and we all dip in a little bow to her. She is as plain as all the Saito family, poor things, but her smile is merry and kind, and she greets her husband warmly and then stands with her hand comfortably tucked in the crook of his arm and looks about her with a cheerful face. She waves at my aunt and points inside the castle to say that we must come to her later. "We'll go at dinnertime," my aunt says to me in a whisper. "Nobody in the world eats better than the Dukes of Izumi."

Konohagakure takes off his helmet and bows to the crowd in general, raises a gauntleted hand on the people who are leaning from upper windows and balancing on garden walls to see the great man. Then he turns and lead his wife inside and everyone has sense that we have seen the cast of players and opening scene of a travelling show. But whether it is a masque, or a party, funeral rites, or the baiting of a wild animal, that has brought so many of the greatest people In the Land of Rivers to Iwate: it is about to begin.


	8. Iwate, The Land of Rivers, Spring 1431P1

Iwate, The Land of Rivers, Spring 1431 PT.1

And then they bodge it. They harass her with erudite questions, query her replies, double back on her answers, write down things she says in moments of weariness and bring them back to her later, define their terms in the most learned ways and ask her what she means, so that she does not understand the question and tells them simply "pass on" or "spare me that". Once or twice she says, " I don't know. I am a simple girl with no learning. How would I know?"

My uncle gets an anguished letter from Queen Yuko of Hadano, who says she is certain that the Prince will ransom Jomei, she just needs another three days, another week to persuade him, can we not delay the trial? Can we not ask for a few days' delay? But the Church has the girl wound tight in the web of inquiry and now they will never let her go.

Everything that highly educated men can do to obscure a simple truth, to make a woman doubt her feelings, to make her own thoughts to muddle, they do to her. They use their learning as a hurdle to herd her one way and then another, and then finally trap her in contradictions of which she can make no sense. Sometimes they accuse her in Old Japanese and she looks at them, baffled by a language that she only ever heard spoken in church, in the Mass that she loves. How could these very sounds, these familiar beloved tones, so solemn and musical to her, now be the voice of accusation?

Sometimes they bring scandal against her in the words of her own people, old earthy stories from Nara, of false pride. They say she jilted a man before marriage, they say she ran away from good parents, they say she worked in ale-house, and was free with her favours like any village slut, they say she rode with the soldiers as their mistress, they say she is no Maid but a whore, and that everyone knew it.

It takes Atsuko, the kind-hearted little Duchess of Konohagakure herself, to assert that Jomei is a virgin, and to demand that the men who guard her are forbidden from touching or abusing her. They must be ordered that it is not work of God to assault her. Then, as soon as this order is given, they say that, since she is now so safe, guarded by the word of the duchess, she has no excuse for wearing men's clothes and she must dress in a gown, for now they tell her it is a sin, a mortal sin, to wear breeches.

They turn her head, they puzzle her beyond bearing. They are great men of the Church and Jomei is a peasant girl, a devout girl who had always done as the priest ordered until she heard the voices of angels who told her to do more. She cries In the end, she breaks down and cries like a child, she puts on the gown as they order her, and confesses to all the sins that they name to her. I don't know know if she even understands the long list. She makes her mark on her confession - she writes her name and then signs a cross beside it as if to deny her signature. She admits that there were no angels and no voices, and that the Prince is nothing more than the Prince and not the King of The Land of Rivers, that is coronation was a sham and her beautiful armour an offence to God and man, and that she is a girl, a silly girl, who tried to lead grown men as if she could know the way better than they. She says she is a vain fool to think a girl might lead men, she is a woman worse than Eve for giving advice, and assistant to the Devil himself.

"What?" bellows the Duke of Konohagakure. We are visiting his wife the duchess m, seated in her rooms before a good fire, a lute player twanging away in the corner, small glasses of the best wine on every table, everything elegant and beautiful; but we hear his deplorable Firemen bellow through two closed doors.

We hear the doors bang as the Earl of Asakusa flings himself out of the duke's apartments to find out what had gone wrong, and in the revealing burst of rage we see - as if we had ever been in any doubt - that these Firemen never wanted the Church to wrestle with the soul of a mistaken girl and restore her to her senses, bring her to confession, penitence and forgiveness - It has all along been nothing but a witch-hunt determined to find a witch, a bonfire looking for a brand, Death waiting for a maiden. The duchess goes to the door and the servants throw it open before her so we can all hear, disastrously clearly, her husband bellow at Suizei Yamato the bishop, Yamato the judge, Yamato the man, who is there apparently representing - all at the same time - God and justice and the Church, "For the sake of God! I don't want her pleading guilty, I don't want her recanting, I don't want her confessed and shriven, I don't want her imprisoned for life! What safety is there in that for me? I want her as a pile of ashes blowing away in the wind. How much clearer do I have to be? Goddamn! Do I have to burn her myself? You said the Church would do it for me! Do it!"

The duchess steps back rapidly and gestures for the doors to her room to be closed, but we can still hear the regent, swearing and damning his soul at the top of his voice. The duchess shrugs - men will be men, and this is wartime - and my aunt smiles understandingly, the lute player increases his volume as best he can and starts to sing. I go to the window and look out.

In the market square they have a half-built pyre, a strong structure with a big central beam and wood stacked around it. Jomei has confessed and recanted, she has been found guilty of her crimes and sentenced to imprisonment.

But they are not taking the wood away.

My aunt gives me a nod that we are going to leave, and I go to the hall to wait for her as she delays inside the duchess's rooms, saying a few words of farewell. I have my hood pulled up over my head, my hands tucked inside my cape. It is cold for May. I wonder if Jomei has blankets in her cell, as the big double doors to the duke's public rooms are thrown open and the duke himself comes quickly out.

I sink down into a curtsey, and I imagine he can barely see me, wrapped in my dark cape in the shadowy doorway. I expect him to brush past; but he pauses. "Hibiki? Hibiki St Mizuki?

I sink even lower. "Yes, Your Grace."

He puts a firm hand under my elbow and raises me up. His other hand pushes back my hood and turns my face to the light of the open doorway, his hand under my chin as if I am a child, and he is looking to see if my mouth is clean. His me are waiting for him, there must be a dozen people around us, but he acts as if we are quite alone. He stares at me intently, as if he would read me. I look back at him blankly, I don't know what he wants with me and my aunt will be angry if I say the wrong thing to this most important man. I give my lip a little nip and I hear his sudden intake of breath.

"My God, how old are you?"

"I am fifteen this year, Your Grace."

"And here with your father?"

"With my uncle, Your Grace. My father is Piko, the new Count of Goto."

"The new count?" he asks, staring at my mouth.

"On the death of the Lady of Goto," I mutter. "My father is now Count of Goto. He was her heir."

"Of course, of course."

There seems nothing else to say but still he is staring at me, still he holds me, one hand on my elbow, the other on the edge of my hood.

"Your Grace?" I whisper, hoping he will come to his senses and let me go.

"Hibiki?" He whispers my name as if he is speaking to himself. "May I serve you in some way?" I mean to "Please let me go"; but a girl my age cannot say such a thing to the the greatest man in the Land of Rivers.

He gives a little choke. "Indeed, I think you may. Hibiki, you are going to be a beautiful woman, a beautiful young woman."

I glance around. His entourage are waiting for him, hardly moving, pretending not see, not to listen. Nobody here is going to tell him to let me go, and I cannot do so.

"Do you have a sweetheart? Eh? Someone taken your heart? Some cheeky little pageboy given you a kiss?"

"No, my lord. No, of course not …" I am stammering as if I am in the wrong, as if I have done something as stupid and as vulgar as he suggests. He is chuckling as though to in indulge me, but the grip on my elbow is hard as if he is angry. I mean back from his grip, from his gaze. "My father is very strict," I say feebly. "The honour of my family … I have been staying me my uncle Junzo and his wife Junko. They would never allow …"

"You don't wish for a husband?" he asks me disbelievingly. "Don't you think of the man who will marry you, when you are in your bed at night? Do you dream of a young husband who will come for you like a poet and speak of love?"

I am trembling now, this is a nightmare. His is as hard as ever, but his hawkish face comes closer and closer, and now he is whispering in my ear. I begin to think he has gone mad. He looks at me if he would eat me, and I have a shuddering sense of a world opening up before me that I don't want to know.

"No, no," I whisper. But then, as he does not release me, but presses me closer, I have a sudden spurt of anger. I remember in a rush who I am, what I am. "May it please Your Grace, I am a maid," I say, the words tumbling. "A maid of the House of Goto. No man has laid a hand on me, no man would dare. I was in the keeping of the Lady of Goto, a virgin like myself. I am fit to capture a unicorn, and I should not be so question …"

There is noise from the duchess's room and the door behind us suddenly opens and once he drops me, like a boy throwing down a stolen pastry. He turns and stretches out both his hands to his plain little wife. "My dear! I was just coming to find you."

Her gaze takes me in, my white face, my hood pulled back, and his rosy bonhomie. "Well, here I am," she says truly. "So you need look no more. And I see you found little Hibiki St Mizuki instead."

I curtsey again, as he glances at me if seeing for the first time. "Good day," he say carelessly, and to his wife he says, confidentially: "I must go. They are making a muddle of it. I have to go."

She nods her head to him with an easy smile and he turns and goes out, all his men marching after him with heavy tread. I dread his wife Atsuko asking me if her husband spoke to me, what be said, what I was doing with him in the darkness of the hall, why he spoke to me of love and poets. For I could not answer such questions. I don't know what he was doing, I don't know why he took hold of me. I feel sick and my knees are trembling to think of his bright eyes on my face and his insinuating whisper. But I know he had no right. And I know that I defended myself, and I know that it is true: I am a virgin so pure that I could capture a unicorn.

But it is worse than thus, far worse; she looks at me steadily, and my sense of outrage slowly drains from me, for she does no ask me what I was doing with her husband, she looks at me as if she knows already. She looks at me up and down, as if she knows everything. She gives me a small complicit smile as if she thinks I am some little thief and she has just caught me with my fingers in her purse.


	9. Iwate, The Land of Rivers, Spring 1431P2

Iwate, The Land of Rivers, Spring 1431 PT.2

Lord Jiro, the Duke of Konohagakure, has his way, the great Earl of Asakusa has his way, the great men of the Land of Fire have their way. Jomei alone, without advisors to keep her safe, changes her mind about her confession, takes off her woman's gown and puts her boy's clothes back on. She cries out that she was wrong to deny her voices, wrong to plead guilty. She is not a heretic, she is not an idolater, she is not a witch or an hermaphrodite or a monster, she will not confess to such things, she cannot force herself to confess to sins she has never committed. She is a girl guided by the angels to seek the Prince of the Land of Rivers and call him to greatness. She has heard angels, they told her to see him crowned as king. This is the truth before God, she proclaims - and so the jaws of the Land of Fire snap shut on her with relish.

From my room in the castle I can see the pyre as they build it even higher. They build a stand for nobility to watch the spectacle as if it were a joust, and barriers to hold back the thousands who will come to see. Finally, my aunt tells me to put on my best gown and tall hat and come with her.

"I am ill, I cannot come," I whisper, but for once she is stern. I cannot be excused, I must be there. I must be seen, beside my aunt, beside Atsuko the Duchess of Konohagakure. We have to play our part in this scene as witnesses, as women who walk inside the rule of men. I will be there to show how girls should be: virgins who do not hear voices, women who do not think they know better than men. My aunt and the duchess and I represent women as men would like them to be. Jomei is a woman that men cannot tolerate.

We stand in the warm May sunshine as if we were waiting for the starting trumpet of a joust. The crowd is noisy and cheerful all around us. A very few people are silent, some women hold a crucifix, one or two have their hands on a cross at their necks; but most people are enjoying the day out, cracking nuts and swigging from flasks, a merry outing on a sunny day in May and the cheering spectacle of a public burning at the end of it.

Then the door opens, and the men of the guard march out and push back the crowd who whisper and hiss and boo at the opening inner door, craning their necks to be first to see her.

She does not look like my friend Jomei - that is my first thought when they bring her out of the little sallyport of the castle. She is wearing her boy's boots once more, but she is not striding out in her loose-limbed, confident walk. I guess that they have tortured her and perhaps the bones of her feet are broken, her toes crushed on the rack. They half-drag her and makes little paddling steps, as if she is trying to find her footing on uncertain ground.

She is not wearing her boy's bonnet on her black cropped hair, for they have shaved her head, she is as bald as a shamed whore. On her bare cold scalp, stained here and there with dried blood where the razor has nicked her pale skin, they have crammed a tall hat of paper like a bishop's mitre, and on it are written her sins, in clumsy block letters for everyone to see: Heretic. Witch. Traitor. She wears a shapeless white robe, knotted with a cheap piece of cord at her waist. It is too long for her and the hems drags around her stumbling feet. She looks ridiculous, a figure of fun, and the people start to catcall and laugh, and someone throws a handful of mud.

She looks around, as if she is desperate for something, her eyes dart everywhere, and I am terrified that she will see me, and know that I have failed to save her, that even now I am doing nothing, and I will do nothing to save her. I am terrified that she will call my name and everyone will know that this broken clown was my friend and that I will be shamed by her. But she is not looking at faces crowding around her, alight with excitement, she is asking for something. I can see her urgently pleading; and then a soldier, and she clutches it as they lift her and push her upwards to the bonfire.

They have built it so high it is hard to get her up. Her feet scrabble on the ladder and her hands cannot grip. But they push her roughly, cheerfully, from behind, hands on her back, her butt, her thighs, and then big soldier goes up the ladder with her and takes a handful of the coarse material of her robe and hauls her up beside him like a sack, turns her around, and puts her back to the stake that runs through the pyre. They throw up a length of chain to him and be loops it around and around her and then fastens it with a bolt behind. He tugs at it, workmanlike, and tucks the wooden cross in the front of her gown, and in the crowd below a friar pushes to the front and holds up a crucifix. She stares at it unblinkingly, and I know, to my shame, that I am glad she has fixed her eyes on the cross so that she will not look at me, in my best gown and my new velvet cap, among the nobility who are talking and laughing all around me.

The priest walks around the bottom of the pyre reading in Old-japanese, the ritual cursing of the heretic; but I can hardly hear him above the yells of encouragement and the rumble of growing excitement from the castle and walk around the pyre, lighting it all the way round the base, and then laying the torches against the wood. Someone has dampened the wood so that it will burn slowly, to give her the greatest pain, and the smoke billows around her.

I can see her lips moving, she is still looking at the upheld cross, I see that she is saying "God, God," over and over, and for a moment I think that perhaps there will be a miracle, a storm to drown the fire, a lightning raid from the Beie forces. But there is nothing. Just the swirling thick smoke, and her white face, and her lips moving.

The fire is slow to catch, the crowd jeer the soldiers for laying a poor bonfire, my toes are cramped in my best shoes. The great bell starts to ring, slowly and solemnly, and though I can hardly see Jomei through the thickening cloud of smoke, I recognise the turn of her head under the great paper mitre as she listens and I wonder if she is hearing her angels through the rolling of the bell, and what they are saying to her now.

The wood shifts a little and the flames start to lick. The inside of the pile is drier - they built it weeks ago for her - and now with a crackle and blaze it is starting to brighten. The light makes the ramshackle buildings of the square jump and loom, the smoke swirls more quickly, the brightness of the fire throws a flickering glow on Jomei and I see her look up, clearly I see her form the word "God," and then like a child going to sleep her head droops and she is quite.

Childishly, I think for a moment perhaps she has gone to sleep, perhaps this is the miracle sent by God, then there is sudden blaze as the long white robe catches fire and tongue of flame flickers up her back and the paper mitre starts to brown and curl. She is still, silent as a little stone angel, and the pyre shifts and the bright sparks fly up.

I got my teeth, and I find my aunt's hand clutching mine. "Don't faint," she hisses. "You have to stand up." We stand hand clasped, our faces quite blank, as if this were not nightmare that tells me, as clearly as if it were written in letters of Fire, what ending a girl may expect if she defies the rules of men and thinks she can make her own destiny. I am here not only to witness what happens to a heretic. I am here to witness what happens to a woman who thinks she knows more then men.

I look through the haze of fire to our window in the castle, and I see the maid, Eiko, looking down. She sees me looks up at her and her and our eyes meet, blank with horror. Slowly, she stretches out her hand and makes the sign that Jomei showed us that day by the moat in the sunshine. Eiko draws a circle in the air with her forefinger, the sign for the wheel of fortune, which can throw a woman so high in the world that she can command a king, or pull her down to this: a dishonored agonising death.


	10. Castle of St Mizuki, Spring 1433 PT1

Castle of St Mizuki, Oga, Spring 1433 PT.1

After a few months with my uncle Junzo, and then a year-long visit to our Bisai kinsfolk, my mother regards me as sufficiently polished to return home while they plan my marriage, and so I am living at our castle in St Mizuki when we hear the news that Atsuko Duchess of Konohagakure has died and the duke is lost without her. Then a letter from my uncle Ryuu, the duke's chancellor.

"Hibiki, this concerns you." My mother summons me to her rooms where I find her seated, my father standing behind her chair. They both look at me sternly and I make a rapid review of my day's doing. I have not completed the many tasks that I am supposed to do, and I skipped attendance at church this morning, my room is untidy and I am behind with my sewing, but surely my father would not come to my mother's apartment to reprimand me for this?

"Yes, Lady Mother?"

My mother hesitates, glances up at my father and then presses on. "Of course your father and I have been considering a husband for you and we have been looking at who might be suitable - we hoped that … but it does not matter, for you are lucky, we have had a mist advantageous offer. In short, your uncle Ryuu has suggested you as a wife for the Duke of Konohagakure. "

I am so surprised that I say nothing.

"A great honour," my father says shortly. "A great position for you. You will be an Fire Land duchess, the first lady after the king's mother in the Land of Fire, the first lady in the Land of Rivers. You should go down on your knees and thank God for this opportunity."

"What?"

My mother nods, confirming this. They both stare at me, expecting a response.

"But his wife has only just died," I say weakly.

"Yes indeed, your uncle Ryuu has done very well for you, to get your name put forwards this early."

"I would have thought he would have wanted to wait a little while."

"Didn't the duke see you in Iwate?" my mother asks. "And then again in Tanigakure?"

"Yes, but he was married," I say foolishly. "He saw me …" I remember that dark predatory look, when I was more than a girl, and my stepping behind my aunt to hide from it. I remember the shadowy hall and the man who whispered in my ear and then went out to order the burning of the Maid. " And the duchess was there. I knew her too. We saw her more than we saw him."

My father shrugs. "At any rate, he liked the look of you and your uncle has put your name in his ear and you are to be his wife."

"He's very old," I say quietly, directing this at my mother.

"Not very. A little over forty," she says.

"And I thought you told me he was ill," I say to my father.

"All the better for you," my mother says. Clearly she means that an elderly husband may be less demanding than a young one, and if he dies then I shall be a widow duchess at seventeen.

"I had not looked for such an honour," I say feebly to them both. "May I be excused? I fear I am not worthy."

"We are the greatest family in Country," my father says grandly. "Kin to the Holy Emperor. How would you not be worthy?"

"You cannot be excused," my mother says. "Indeed, you would be a fool to be anything but delighted. Any girl in the Land of Rivers and Fire would give her right hand for such a match." she pauses and clears her throat. "He is the greatest man in Rivers and Fire after the King of The Land of Fire. And if the king were to die …"

"Which God forbid," my father says hastily.

"God forbid indeed; but if the king were to die then the duke would be heir to the throne of The Land of Fire and you would be Queen of the Land of Fire. What d'you think about that?"

"I have not thought of marriage to such a man as the duke."

"Think now then," my father says briskly. "For he is coming here in April, to marry you."


	11. Castle of St Mizuki, Spring 1433 PT2

Castle of St Mizuki, Oga, Spring 1433 PT.2

My uncle Ryuu, who is Bishop if Towada as well as the duke's chancellor, is both host and priest at this wedding of his own making. He entertains us in his episcopal palace and Jiro Duke of Konohagakure rides in with his guard in the Fire Land livery of red and white, as I stand at the doorway of the palace in a gown of palest yellow with a veil of tissue of gold floating from my high headdress.

His page forwards to hold his horse's head, and another kneels on the ground alongside and then drops his hands and knees to form a human mounting block. The duke climbs down heavily, from the stirrup onto the man's back, and then steps down to the ground. Nobody remarks on this. The duke is such a great man that his pages take it as an honour for him to stand on them. His squire takes his helmet and his metalled gauntlets, and steps aside.

"My lord." My uncle the bishop greets his master with obvious affection and then bows to kiss his hand. The duke claps him on the back and then turns to my father, and my mother. Only when the courtesies with them are complete does he turn to me, and he steps forwards, takes both of my hands, pulls me towards him, and kisses me on the mouth.

His chin is rough with stubble, his breath tainted; it is like being licked by a hound. His face seems very big as it comes down towards me, and very big as he moves away. He does not pause to look at me, or smile, just that one aggressive kiss, he turns to my uncle and says, "Do you have no wine?" and they laugh for it is a private joke, based on their years of friendship, and my uncle leads the way inside and my mother and father follow them, and I am left for a moment, looking after the older people, with the squire at my side.

"My lady," he says. He has passed the duke's armour to another, and now he bows to me and doffs his hat. His dark shoulder length hair, his eyes are the same color is mine. He has a funny twist in his smile, as if something is amusing him. He is stunningly handsome, I can hear the ladies in waiting behind me give a little murmur. He makes a bow and offers me his arm to take me inside. I put my hand on his and feel the warmth of his hand through the soft leather of his glove. At once, he pulls off the glove so his fingers are holding mine. I feel as if I would like him to take my hand in take hold of my shoulders, to grip me at the waist.

I shake my head to clear my mind of such ridiculous thoughts and I say, abruptly, like an awkward girl: "I'll go in alone, thank you," and I drop his hand, and follow them inside.

The three men seated, wine glasses in their hands, my mother is in a window embrasure, watching the servants bring little cakes and top up their glasses. I go to her side with her ladies in waiting, and my two little sisters who are dressed in their best and trusted to stand with the adults on this most important day. I wish that I was eight years old like Izumi, and could look at Jiro, the Duke of Konohagakure, and marvel at his greatness and know that he would say nothing to me, that he would not even see me. But I am not a little girl anymore, and as I look across at him, he does see me, he looks at me with a sort of avid curiosity, and this time there is nowhere for me to hide.

My mother comes to my room the night before my wedding. She brings the gown for the next day and lays it carefully in the chest at the foot of my bed. The tall headdress and veil mounted on a stand, safely out the way of candles of dust.

My maid is brushing my hair before the beaten silver mirror, but as my mother comes in I say, "You can stop now, Mai," and twists the long fall into a loose plait, ties it with a ribbon, and goes from the room.

Mother sits awkwardly on the bed. "I need to speak to you about marriage," she starts. "About what your duties will be as a married woman. I suppose you should know."

I turn my stool and wait, saying nothing.

"This is a marriage of great advantage to you," she says. "We are of Goto, of course, but to gain the position of an Fire Land duchess is a great thing."

I nod. I wonder if she is going to say anything about what happens on the wedding night. I am afraid of the great duke and I am dreading the thought of spending the night with him. The last wedding I went to they put the couple in bed together and in the morning they fetched them out with music and singing and laughing, and then the mother went in and brought out the sheets and they were red with blood. Nobody would tell me what had happened, if there had been some sort of accident. Everyone behaved as if everything was quite wonderful, as if they were pleased at sight of blood on the linen. Indeed, they were laughing and congratulating the bridegroom. I wonder if my mother is going to explain now.

"But for him, it is not a marriage of advantage," she says. "it may cost him very dear."

"The jointure?" I ask, thinking that it must cost him money to pay me my allowance.

"His allies," she says. "He has been in alliance with the Dukes of Izumi to fight against the Bieiens. The Land of Fire could not have fought such a war without their support. His wife was Atsuko of Izumi - the present duke was her brother - and she made it her business to keep her brother and her husband in good friendship. Now she has died, there is no-one to keep the friendship, no-one to help them resolve their disagreements."

"Well, I can't," I say, thinking of the Duke of Izumi whom I seen half a dozen times in my whole life, while certainly he has never notice me at all.

"You will have to try," my mother says. "It will be your duty, as an Fire Land duchess, to hold Izumi in alliance with The Land of Fire. Your husband will expect you to entertain his allies and to be charming."

"Charming?"

"Yes. But there is a difficulty. Because my lord Jiro of Konohagakure is marrying you so soon after the death of his wife, the Duke of Izumi is offended at the insult to his dead sister. He has taken it badly."

"Then why are we marrying so quickly?" I ask. "If it upsets the Duke of Izumi? Surely we should leave it a year and not displease him? He is our kinsman, as well as the Duke of Konohagakure's ally. Surely we should not offend him?"

My mother smiles faintly. "It makes you a duchess," she reminds me. "A greater title than mine."

"I could be a duchess next year." The thought of escaping this marriage, even for a year, fills me hope. "We could just be betrothed."

"Lord Jiro won't wait," she says flatly. "So don't hope for that. I just want to warn you that he may lose his ally by marrying you. You must do all that you can to retain the friendship of the Duke of Izumi, and remind them both that you are a kinswoman of Izumi and his vassal. Speak to the Duke of Izumi privately and promise him that you remember your kinship to the Izumians. Do all you can to keep the friendship between the two of them, Hibiki."

I nod. I really don't know what she thinks I can do, a seventeen year old girl, to maintain an alliance of two great men old enough to be my father. But I will have to promise to do my best.

"And the marriage …" I begin.

"Yes?"

I take a breath. "What exactly happens?"

She shrugs, she makes a little face as if talk of it is beneath her, or embarrassing, or even worse - too disagreeable for words. "Oh, my dear, you just do your duty. He will tell you what he expects. He will tell you what to do. He won't expect you to know anything, he will prefer to be your instructor."

"Does it hurt?" I ask.

"Yes," she says unhelpfully. "But not for very long. Since he is older and practised, he should do his best to see that you are not hurt too badly." She hesitates. "But if he does hurt you …"

"Yes?"

"Don't complain of it."


	12. Castle of St Mizuki, Spring 1433 PT3

Castle of St Mizuki, Oga, Spring 1433 PT.3

The wedding is to be at midday and I start preparing at eight in the morning when my maid brings me rice and meat and small ale to sustain me through the long day. I giggle when I see the tray heaped with food. "I'm not going out hunting, you know."

"No," she says ominously. "You are to be hunted," and the other maids with her all cackle like a pen of hens and that is the last joke I am going to offer all day.

I sit at the table in a sulk, and eat, while they embroider versions of the theme of me being hunted and caught and enjoying the case, until my mother comes in, and behind her come two serving men, rolling the great wooden barrel of a bath.

They place it before the fire in my bedroom, line it with linen and start to pour in jug after jug of hot water. The maids bustle about bringing drying sheets, and start to lay out my new under gowns, with much comment about the lace and the ribbons and how fine everything is, and how lucky I am. My mother sees my strained expression and shoos them all from the room except our old nursemaid who is to scrub my back and wash my hair and jugs of hot water. I feel like a sacrificial lamb being cleaned and brushed before having its throat cut; and it is not a pleasant thought.

But our nursemaid Mabuki is cheerful and full of her usual clucking approbation of my beautiful hair and my beautiful skin and if she had half my looks she would have run away to Ōzu - as ever - and when I have bathed and she has dried my hair and plaited it, I cannot help but be encouraged by the linen under gown with the new ribbons, and by the new shoes and by the beautiful cloth-of-gold, and the headdress. The maids come back in to help me dress, and tie the laces of the gown and straighten my headdress and pull the veil over my shoulders and finally pronounce me ready for my wedding and as beautiful as bride should be.

I turn to the great looking glass that my mother has ordered to be carried into my chamber, and my reflection looks back at me. The maids hold it before me and tip it slightly downwards so that I can first see the hem of my gown, embroidered with little red lions rampant, from the standard of our house, and my red leather slippers with the curling toes. Then they hold the mirror straight, and I can see the cloth-of-gold gown gathered at the high waist and the embroidered heavy belt of gold that slung low over my slim hips. I gesture and they raise the mirror so I can see the expensive cream lace veiling the low-cut neck of the gown, the gold sleeves falling from my shoulders, with the white linen under-gown revealed tantalisingly through the slashing at the shoulders, and then my face. My dark hair is plaited away and tucked under the tall headdress, and my face looks solemnly at me, enhanced by the silvery reflection of the mirror. My grey eyes are wide in this light, my skin clear and pearly, the mirror makes me look like a statue of beauty, a marble girl. I gaze at myself as if I would know who I am, and for a moment I think I see Mizu, the founder of our house, looking back at me through moonlit water.

"When you are a duchess you will have a great mirror of your own," my mother says. "Everything fine. And you will have all her old clothes."

"Duchess Atsuko's clothes?"

"Yes," she says, as if wearing the wardrobe of a recently dead woman should be a great treat for me. "Her sables are the best I have ever seen. Now they will be yours."

"Wonderful," I say politely. "Will I get my own clothes as well?"

She laughs. "You will be the first lady in The Land of Rivers, all but the first lady in The Land of Fire. You will be able to have whatever your husband wants to give you. And you will soon learn how to persuade him."

A woman whispers something behind her hand about how a girl like me might persuade a man as old as he with one hand tied," and a couple of them laugh. I have no idea what they mean.

"He will love you," my mother promises. "He is quite mad for you."

I don't reply. I just look at the young woman in the mirror. The thought of Jiro, Duke of Konohagakure, running mad for me is not encouraging at all.


	13. Castle of St Mizuki, Spring 1433 PT4

Castle of St Mizuki, Oga, Spring 1433 PT.4

The wedding service lasts about an hour. It is all in Old Japanese so half of the vows are incomprehensible to me, anyway. It is not a private plighting of promises, but more a great announcement as the hall of bishop's palace fills with strangers come to look at me and celebrate my good fortune. When the vows are done and we walk through the crowd, I am escorted by my new husband, my fingertips resting on his sleeve, there is a roar of approbation and everywhere I look I see smiling avid faces.

We sit at the top table, facing the room. There is a bawl of trumpets from the gallery and the first of dozens of plates of food is matched into the room at shoulder height. The servers come to us at the high table first, and put a little from every dish on each golden plate, then the duke points them here and there down the hall, so that his favorites may share our dishes. For everyone else, the great bowls of meat come in and great platters of white bread. It is a huge feast, my uncle Ryuu has spared no expense to please his patron and to celebrate my rise to the royalty of The Land of Fire.

They bring in wine in great golden jugs and they pour glass after glass at the high table. The honoured guests, those who sit above the great golden bowl of salt, have as much wine as they can drink, as fast as they can drink it. In the hall the men have tankard after tankard of ale, the best ale: wedding ale specially brewed for today, specially sweetened and spicy.

There is a challenger, who rides his house right into the hall, and throws down his gauntlet in my name. His horse curves its heavy muscled neck and eyes the tables and the great circular fireplace in the centre of the hall. I have to get up from my place and come round on the raised dais of the high table to give him a golden cup, and then he goes all round the hall at a powerful trot, his rider sitting heavily in embossed saddle, before catering out the double doors. It seems quite ridiculous to me, to ride a horse into dinner, especially such a heavy house and such a weighty knight. I look up and I meet the gaze of the young squire who is dangerously near to laugher, as I am. Quickly, we both look away from each other's dancing eyes before I betray myself and giggle.

There are twenty course of meats, and ten of fish, then everything is taken away and wine chintashu wine is served with a voider course of potted fruit, sugared plums and sweetmeats. When everyone has tasted all of these they bring in the final course of pastries, sugared fruits and gingerbread decorated with real gold leaf. In comes the fool who juggles and cracks bawdy jokes about youth and age, male and female, and heat of the wedding bed, which is the fire to forge a new life. He is followed by dancers and players who perform a masque celebrating the power of the Land of Fire and the beauty of Goto with beautiful woman, almost naked but her long green tail of silk, who symbolises Mizu. The best of them all is a costumed lion, the emblem of both our countries, who cavorts and dances with strength and grace, and finally comes, panting a little, to the high table and bows his great head to me. His mane is a mass of golden curls smelling of sacking, his face a mask of painted paper, with a smiling honest look. I have a good chain to put around his neck and as I stretch towards him and he bows his head to me I recognise the gleam of grey eyes through the mask and know that my hands are on the shoulders of the handsome squire, and that I am standing close enough to embrace him as I put my chain around his neck.

My mother nods to me that we can leave, and the women and musicians all rise up and dance in a line round the length of the hall and then make an archway with their hands held high and I walk through it, with all the girls wishing me luck and the women calling blessings down on me. I am preceded by my dancing little sisters who scatter rose petals and little golden keys on the floor where I walk. Everyone escorts me up the great flight of stairs to the best chambers and they all seem disposed to crowd into the bedroom with me; but my father stops them at the door, and I go in with just my mother and the ladies of her court.

First they unpin my high headdress and lift it carefully away, and then unpin my hair. My scalp aches as the tightly plaited hair tumbles down and I rub my face. They untie the laces of my gown at my shoulders to take off the sleeves, then they untie the fastenings at the back and drop it to the floor and I carefully step out of it. They takes it away to shake it and powder it and store it carefully for the next important event when I will wear it as the Duchess of Konohagakure, and the red lions on the hem will symbolise the house that was once mine. They untie the laces of my under-gown and strip me naked, then, while I shiver, they throw my nightgown over my head, and put a wrap around my shoulders. They seat me on a stool and bring a bowl of hot scented water and soak my cold feet and lean back as one of them brushes my hair while the others pull at embroidered hem of the gown, tidy the fall of the wrap, and put the room to rights. Finally they pay my feet dry, plait my hair, tie a nightcap on my head, and then they throw open the door.

My uncle Ryuu comes in dressed in his bishop's cope and mitre, swinging a censer, and he proceeds all round the room, blessing every corner, an wishing me happiness, wealth, and above all fertility, in great match between the Land of Fire and the country of Goto. "Amen," I say. "amen," but it seems that he will never stop and then, from the hall below, comes a great rumble of male voices and laughter and the bare of trumpets and banging of drums and they are bringing my bridegroom, the old duke, to my room.

They carry him shoulder high, shouting "Hurrah! Hurrah!" and they set him on his feet just outside my door so that he can walk in and they can all trumble in behind him. Hundreds are left in the rooms outside, craning to see, and shouting for others to move up. The Fool capers in, his bladder in his hand, poking at the bed and declaring that it need be soft for the duke will make a heavy landing. There is a roar of laughter at this, which spreads out of the room to the chambers beyond and even down to the hall as the jest is repeated. Then the Fool commands the girls to build up the fire to keep the bed warm, and top up the wedding ale for the duke may get his thirst on, and then he may need to get up in the night. "Up in the night!" he says again, and everyone laughs.

The trumpets blast a summons, deafening in the bedroom, and my father says, "Well, we will leave them! Goodnight." My mother kisses me on the forehead, and all her ladies and half of the guests kiss me too. Then my mother leads me to bed and helps me climb into it. I sit there, propped on pillows like a hand-carved poppet. On the other side, the duke is throwing off his dressing gown and his squire pulls back the sheets and helps his lord into bed. The squire keeps his eyes down and does not look at me, and I am still, like a stiff little doll, one hand holding the neck of my nightgown tightly under my chin.

We sit upright, side by side, while everyone laughs and cheers and wishes us well, and then my father and my uncle guide and half push the revellers from the room and they close the door on us and we can still hear them, singing their way down the stairs back to the hall and shouting for my drink to toast the health of the happy couple and wet the head of the baby who will be, God willing, this very night.

"Are you well, Hibiki?" the duke asks me as the room grows slowly quiet and the candles burn steadily, now that the doors are closed.

"I am well, my lord," I say. My heart is beating so loudly that I think he must hear it. More than anything else I am painfully aware that I have no idea what I should do, or what he may ask me.

"You can go to sleep," he says heavily. "For I am dead drunk. I hope you will be happy, Hibiki. I will be a kind husband to you. But go to sleep now, for I am drunk as a bishop."

He heaves the bedclothes over his own shoulders, and rolls over on his side, as if there was nothing more to say or do, and within moments he is snoring so loudly that I fear they will hear him in the hall below. I lie still, almost afraid to move, and then, as his breathing deepens and slows, and snores settle to a steady low roar and grunt, I slip from bed, take a sip of wedding ale - since after all it is my wedding day- blow out the candles, and then climb back between the warm sheets beside the unfamiliar bulk of a sleeping man.

I think I will never sleep. I can hear the singing from the hall below and then the noise as people spill out into the courtyard outside and shout for torches and servants to show them to their beds for the night. The steady rumble of my husband's snore is like the roar from a bear pit, pointing loud and threatening. I think I will never ever sleep with such a great man in my bed, and this buzz of thoughts in my head, and the grumbles to myself about this discomfort, and how unfair it is to me, I slide into sleep.


	14. Castle of St Mizuki, Spring 1433 PT5

Castle of St Mizuki, Oga, Spring 1433 PT.5

I wake to find my new husband already awake, pulling on his breeches, his white linen shirt open to his broad waist, his fleshy hairy chest and big belly half-exposed. I sit up in bed and gather my nightgown around me. "My lord."

"Good morning, wife!" he says with a smile. "Did you sleep well?"

"Yes," I say. "I think you did?"

"Did I snore?" he asks cheerfully.

"A little."

"More than a little, I wager. Was it like a thunderstorm?"

"Well, yes."

He grins. "You will get used to it. Atsuko used to say it was like living by the sea. You get used to the noise. It is when there is silence that it wakes you."

I blink at the opinions of my predecessor.

He comes around to my side of the bed and sits heavily on my feet. "Ah, excuse me."

I move out of his way, and he sits again. "Hibiki, I am a good deal older than you. I must tell you, I will not be able to give you a son, nor any child at all. I am sorry for that."

I take a little breath, and wait to see what terrible thing he will say next. I had thought he had married me to get an heir. Why else would a man want a young bride? He answers this at once, before it is even spoken.

"Nor shall I take your virginity," he says quietly. "For one thing, I am unmanned, and so I cannot readily do it; for another, I don't want to do it with you."

My hands tightens on the nightgown at my throat. My mother will be appalled when she finds out about this. I am going to be in so much trouble with my father. "My lord, I am very sorry. You don't like me?"

He laughs shortly. "What man could not? You are the most exquisite girl in the Land of Rivers, I chose you for your beauty and for your youth - but for something else too. I have a better task for you than being my bedmate. I could command any girl in the Land of Rivers. But you, I trust, are fit to do something more. Do you not know?"

Dumbly, I shake my head.

"The Lady said you had a gift," he says quietly.

"My great-aunt?"

"Yes. She told your uncle that you had the gift of your family, she said you have the Sight. And he told me."

I am silent for a moment. "I don't know."

"She said she thought you might have. She said she had spoken with you. Your uncle tells me that you studied with her, that she left you her books, her bracelet with charms for foreseeing. That you can hear singing."

"He told you that?"

"Yes, and I assume that she left her things to you because she thought you would be able to make use of them."

"My lord …"

"This is not a trap, Hibiki, I am not tricking you into a confession."

You tricked Jomei, I think to myself.

"I am working for my king and my country, we are near to finding, the elixir that brings a cure for death, and makes the philosopher's stone."

"The philosopher's stone?"

"Hibiki, I think we are very close to finding the way to turn iron into gold. We are very close. And then …"

I wait.

"Then I will have enough coin to pay my troops to fight for every town in the Land of Rivers. Then the rule of the Land of Fire can spread peace over all our lands. Then my nephew can sit firmly on his throne, and the poor people of the Land of Fire can work for their living without being taxed into poverty. It would be a new world, Hibiki. We would command it. We would pay for everything with gold that we make in Konohagakure. We would not have to dig it in Yahata nor pan it in Wakamatsu. We would have a country richer than any dream. And I am, I think, perhaps only a few months from finding it."

"And what about me?"

He nods, as I return him to reality of this wedding-day morning, which is not a real wedding at all. "Oh yes. You. My alchemists, my astrologers tell me that I need someone with your gifts. Someone who can scry, who can look into a mirror or into water and see the truth, the future. They need an assistant with clean hands and a pure heart. It has to be a woman, a young woman who has never taken a life, never stolen, never known lust. When I first met you they had just told me that they could go no further without a young woman, a virgin, who could see the future. In short, I needed a girl who could capture a unicorn."

"My Lord Duke …"

"You said that. D'you remember? In the hall of the castle at Iwate? You said you were a girl so pure that you could capture a unicorn."

I nod. I did say it. I wish I had not.

"I understand that you are shy. You will be anxious to tell me you cannot do these things. I understand your reserve. But tell me only this. Have you taken a life?"

"No, of course not."

"Have you stolen? Even a little fairing? Even a coin from another's pocket?"

"No."

"Have you lusted for a man?"

"No!" I say emphatically.

"Have you ever foretold the future, in any way at all?"

I hesitate. I think of Jomei and the card of the hanging man, and the wheel of fortune that bore her down so low. I think of the singing around the turrets on the night that the Lady died. "I think so. I cannot be sure. Sometimes things come to me, it is not that I call them."

"Could you capture a unicorn?"

I give a little nervous laugh. "My lord. It is just a saying, it is just a tapestry-picture. I wouldn't know what one is supposed to do …"

"They say that the only way to capture a unicorn is for a virgin to go alone into the forest, that no man can set a hand on it, but that it will come to a virgin and lay it's beautiful head in her lap."

I shake my head. "I know this is what they say, but I didn't know anything about unicorns. My lord, I don't even know if they are real."

"At any rate, as a virgin you are of great value to me, a very precious thing to me. As a virginal daughter of the House of Mizu, as an heiress of her gifts, you are beyond precious. As a young wife you would be a pleasure to me; but nothing more. I have married you to do far, far more than merely lie on your back and please me. Do you understand now?"

"Not really."

"Never mind. What I want is a young woman pure in heart, a virgin, who will do my bidding, who is mine, as much as if I had bought a slave from the Takefu galleys. And this is what I have in you. You will learn what I want from you later, you will do what I want. But you won't be hurt or frightened, you have my word."

He gets to his feet takes his dagger from the sheath at his belt. "Now we have to stain the sheets," he says. "And if anyone asks you, your mother or your father, you tell them that I got on top of you, that it hurt a little, and that you hope we have made a child. Say nothing about the life we are have. Let them think you are an ordinary wife and that I have deflowered you."

He takes his dagger and without another word he makes a quick slice against his left wrist and the blood wells up quickly from the scratch. He lets it come and then he pulls back the covers of the bed, ignoring me as I tuck my bare feet out of sight, and he holds out his hand and drips a few spots of red blood onto the sheets. I stare at them as stain spreads, feeling utterly ashamed, thinking that this is my marriage, that starts in my husband's blood, with a lie.

"That'll do," he says. "Your mother will come to see me this and believe that I have had you. D'you remember what to tell her?"

"That you got on top of me, that it hurt a little, and that I hope we have made a child," I repeat obediently.

"That I am going to keep you as a virgin is our secret." He is suddenly serious, almost threatening. "Don't forget that. As my wife you will know my secrets, and this is the first, and one of the greatest of them. The alchemy, the foreseeing, your virginity, these are all secrets that you must keep, on your honour, and tell no-one. You are of the royal house of the Land of Fire now, which will bring you greatness but also great cost. You have to pay the price as well as enjoy the wealth."

I nod, my eyes on his dark face.

He rises from the bed, and takes his dagger to the bottom sheet. Without thinking of the cost, he slices a thin strip of linen. Mutely he holds it out to me and I tie it around his wrist over the cut. "Pretty maid," he says. "I shall see you at breakfast," and then he pulls on his boots and walks from the room.


End file.
